The idea is that the router plugs in to your home internet and the server into the router. Between the two they get the server able to handle incoming requests so that you can host services on the box and address them from the broader Internet.

Why would I need a separate router for that? I’d need to configure the main router anyway.

Which display size? How much storage?

Budget?

Ah. Personally I’d do the mounting via fstab to get a consistent path.

How do you mount your volume?

I am unsure about sustainability

In what regard?

Apart from the world of trouble you might get yourself into when doing such things on secured systems, why are you going at it in such a complicated way?

Why not simply use a self hosted file/document storage and sharing solution like Nextcloud or Pydio Cells or something like that? Reachable through standard HTTP(S), which is a lot easier to reach than most other protocols.

Ideally he’s needing something great for video encoding, and Linux friendly to boot.

What’s the plan here, using the laptop for gaming and streaming, or only using the laptop as the streaming machine?

That depends on if you trust them. Also, would this be your only backup?

Nice haul! I hope you also managed to get the small power plant for the drives. That’s not going to be pretty.

Grafana + Prometheus + data gathering will at least give you the resource and usage stats.

Considering it’s basically just a script “frontend”: wireguard and its documentation.

That setting also takes host names. As long as both containers share at least one network, put in the service name (not the container_name!), e.g. “npm” or whatever yours is called and you should be fine.

As far as I understood from some research is that I would need to install and run an DHCP server on my laptop, which they did not recommend.

Or simply set up the Pi with a static IP.

there does not seem to be a standard for connecting to a device directly over a single cable and login with a user account.

There is. A cable. You just need two non-identical IPs from the same subnet, e.g. 10.0.0.1 and 10.0.0.2 or whichever you want from the private ranges.

Audiobooks

Do yourself a favor and have a look at Audiobookshelf.

Which codecs do you have in your library? Also which resolution/bitrate?

Also, have a look at Lodi as a client.

Where does it fail?